The kind of writing you just can't read

I like to think that I'm open-minded about books, but having looked closely at my library thing bookshelves, I'm not so sure that's true. I do have pet hates that can put me off a book entirely; here are some of them, and I'm hoping others can share their ideas.

1. Protagonists who are not people (aliens are okay).
I cannot read a book whose central character is a dog, for instance. So that rules out Greyfriars Bobby and a lot of Jack London - classics, I'm sure, but I don't want to exhaust myself with having to imagine the world through the eyes of an animal. Aliens aren't so bad, so long as their alien-ness doesn't obstruct.

2. Over-reliance on italics.
I absolutely hate when an author places stress on words or feelings by using italics. Does the writer not think I know which words to stress? It interrupts the flow of the writing and makes me think I'm being lectured at like an imbecile, and besides, most instances of italics use are very lazy - they appear when the writer wants to explain something rather than show it and let us explain it to ourselves. Tiresome.

3. Books that start with pronouns.
If I have to read one more book that begins "He woke up slowly, unsure of where he was," without knowing who 'he' is, then I'm going to scream - or more likely, just not read any more of that book. We've all seen it happen (examples please, people!), and I don't think we've ever enjoyed it. After all, starting a book really is like getting into somebody's head, and we wouldn't want to do that whilst riding a wave of nausea, now would we?

Okay, so these are the first three things that came to mind - I'm sure there are others, but for now it's over to you.

In the non-fiction realm, I hate academic writing that over-relies on quotation marks (sometimes single, sometimes double, depending on the author's preference) to indicate that a given word is either a social construct or that the author is using it ironically or sarcastically or whatever. I once read a book about the Lebanese middle class where half the words in any given sentence were in scare quotes. It is actually one of the best books I've read, but the author's use of those quotes just killed me! It's like - Ok we get it - everything is a construct! Now shut up and talk about it!

I have a lot of trouble with books that are consciously trying to be Great Important Literary Works That Teach The Reader About Life (TM). In those cases, it's the tone of the book that bothers me, not a specific quality.

>3 xicanti:, Can you give examples of a couple of books that fit this category? (That way I can avoid them!)

I know this is a flaw on my part but I do not enjoy reading books that are written in heavy local dialect...The classic Huck Finn is a good example.....

#4 - the one that jumps instantly to mind is House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday. I'm sure he did indeed say lots of deep, important things with that book, but he was so bloody obvious about it that I gave up barely a hundred pages in.

>5 KC9333:, I sometimes find it hard to understand books like that. When I read Wuthering Heights, I was often confused about what some of the characters were actually saying!

After I read The Grapes of Wrath, I found myself speaking the way the book was written!

Books that are more footnote material than text

I can't stand present-tense in writing. For that reason I go out of my way to avoid most of Donna Jo Napoli's works.

Gratuitous period detail. Incorrect gratuitous period detail. Non-fiction pretending to be historical fiction (Longitude, Last journey of William Huskisson, etc.).

>2 fannyprice: Academic prose is too easy a target. What about all those pairs of opposites separated by oblique strokes ("hot/cold" etc.), or gratuitous foreign words. I just did a random flip through Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and the first example to catch my eye was nachträglichkeit with for some reason a small "n". How to irritate German speakers and non-German speakers all at the same time!

Dialect in excess is irritating, but I can live with it if it is a sincere attempt to represent the way people in that time and place talk. There's a huge difference between a book like Wuthering Heights , where the author lived in Haworth, knew how West Riding farmers talk, and recorded it convincingly, and something like Hard times, where Dickens is just making it up as he goes along.

I suspect that Mark Twain makes it up as he goes along too, but the result is a lot funnier than Stephen Blackpool!

I just took The Echoing Green back to the library after trying to read the first few chapters. It's a story I'm interested in, as a longtime baseball and Dodgers fan, but I couldn't get through it. Why? As I wrote at a baseball blog which reviewed it:

I've got this in hand, but it's a real pain to read, because the author has really annoying (not to say wrong) habits of sentence structure.

Example: Writing about Brown v. Board of Education, he says

"The parents wished for their twenty children entrance to a nonsegregated elementary school."

Writing about baseball at Norfolk Naval Base during the war, he says

"Norfolk earmarked annually an incredible $100,000 for its baseball team."

I don't know about you, but those sentences just grate on my ears and in my eyes.

And those may not even be the most egregious examples. It was just too awful to continue.

I hate that "I am smarter than you tone" that pervades some author's works epitomized most memorably for me in Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. Get over yourself.

I really hate historical fiction that gets the facts wrong (for example, people in pre-Columbus Europe eating fruits and vegetables that came from South America, or using inventions before they were invented).

I also really hate characters in historical fiction that have our current sensibilities and sense of political correctness . . . this can get really tricky with women characters because it's inaccurate to portray them as feminists, yet I certainly don't want to read about some meek woman who defers to every male character just because he's a he.

Using capslock (or worse, small caps) instead of italics for emphasis. Online, in small doses, I can take it. In a book, a printed book...just say no, people!

Taking a present-day idiom and 'adapting' it to fit a fantasy realm. Mercedes Lackey in particular, and I think also Anne McCaffrey, are guilty of this. It's sounds stupid and is totally jarring.

Also, using the same turn of phrase repeatedly (and consciously) over and over again. There are many different ways to say the same thing; using the same phrase repeatedly throughout a book just makes it irritating.

I hate when an author puts his own particular favorite music or movies in, especially when it's supposed to make you relate to or like a character. I can't read Charles de Lint for this (and other) reasons.

>8 Seajack: Personally, I love footnotes. But, I hate endnotes. If something is so interesting that it requires mentioning, even as an aside, why must I go search for it? Put it where I can see it!

Based on some current reading:

I hate authors who cannot use a thesaurus, or used a thesaurus for the most unusual word, and keep using the same word over and over and over again. If I read the word contretemps one more time...

In the not-a-type-of-writing-but-irritating-nonetheless category, I hate books in art history that do not show the works they are comparing or describing.

>16 ExVivre:

I completely agree about the art history books.

Another disgrace is a black and white photo of a color painting/print (where color plays a very important, if not central role.)

Bad writing.

I can read almost anything if it's well written.

*Non-fiction that's really dry or overly pedantic. Especially when each chapters starts, "In this chapter I would like to introduce..."

*Footnotes. Yes. Chuck Klosterman gets a little crazy with the footnotes, but in Perfect From Now On:How Indie Rock Saved My Life, John Sellers wins the prize for gratuitous footnoting.

*Anyone too hip or too self-consciously cool, like Dave Eggers and Nick Hornby.

I can't stand books in first person, and I can't even explain why, maybe because I want to be alone and it feels like someone is talking to me.

It's funny that I've just read this thread because last night at my local bookstore I picked up and read the first chapter of Eats, shoots, and leaves. I was going to buy the book because I had heard a lot of good things about it but I couldn't stand the attitude/tone of the author so I changed my mind and left it.

>21 kiwiflowa: It was too snarky for me, too. I gave up about a 1/3 of the way through.

Woe Is I by Patricia T. O'Conner is a less snarky Eats, Shoots, and Leaves.

#21-23, I'm an editor and I HATED Eats, Shoots and Leaves. I'm still mad at myself for buying it, and in hard cover at that!

Books in translation where you realize it is a translation and, like Rebecca (#18), bad writing.

#1 Soylent, I just guffawed when I read "books which start with pronouns". Oh my yes...

#13: that's a pet peeve too - people in Arthur's time eating potatoes or who lugged that orange all the way from Spain to that person in northern Ireland in the Iron Age?

Books in dialect- I couldn't read Ulverton by Adam Thorpe Did I miss something? I looked ahead to see if the dialect stopped and no.. so I gave away the book.

I don't like overly descriptive books like The Lord of the Rings, for example. I also don't like thoroughly depressing stories like Fall on Your Knees. Biographies tend to bore me even when it's someone I really like. And, I don't really like books that use a lot of "big" words because having to look up what they mean when I'm reading is just too much like work!

The kind of books that start with prologues, especially high fantasy. Ugh!

I went through a phase where I would turn to the first page to see if it was written in first person narrative and then reject it. I seem to have gotten over that. Heavy dialect can be annoying although I've found that reading Robert Burns aloud did help me figure out what he was actually saying when I otherwise couldn't make it out on the page. Bad grammar is always a killer for me. When I want to take out the red ex-school teacher pen and make corrections it's best to put it aside. The Celestine Prophecies is a prime example.

1. Books that I wish I could edit
I'm prejudiced against very long books because I suspect there's a lot of stuff that could have been eliminated. I hate books where the writer tries to be overly descriptive, uses too many adverbs, or thinks that large words are automatically better than small ones. Books like that make me want to get out my red pen of doom and hack out great swathes of unnecessary text, so I'm too annoyed with them to read them.

2. Multi-generational family sagas
No good reason I guess. I just find it cliched and gimmicky a lot of the time.

3. Books that self-consciously deliver a message
I consider Paul Coelho's The Alchemist a prime offender.

1. Books that I wish I could edit
I'm prejudiced against very long books because I suspect there's a lot of stuff that could have been eliminated. I hate books where the writer tries to be overly descriptive, uses too many adverbs, or thinks that large words are automatically better than small ones. Books like that make me want to get out my red pen of doom and hack out great swathes of unnecessary text, so I'm too annoyed with them to read them.

2. Multi-generational family sagas
No good reason I guess. I just find it cliched and gimmicky a lot of the time.

3. Books that self-consciously deliver a message
I consider Paul Coelho's The Alchemist a prime offender.

1. Books that I wish I could edit
I'm prejudiced against very long books because I suspect there's a lot of stuff that could have been eliminated. I hate books where the writer tries to be overly descriptive, uses too many adverbs, or thinks that large words are automatically better than small ones. Books like that make me want to get out my red pen of doom and hack out great swathes of unnecessary text, so I'm too annoyed with them to read them.

2. Multi-generational family sagas
No good reason I guess. I just find it cliched and gimmicky a lot of the time.

3. Books that self-consciously deliver a message
I consider Paul Coelho's The Alchemist a prime offender.

Gratuitious foreign words, when the rest of the sentance is in english. Tom Clancy being a particular culpret though he has many other failings. If the character knows the language, then give it to us as they understand it. It only works if the character is supposed to understand only a fragment of the sentance and even then it's a limited plot device.

Books I wish I could edit too. I have no problem with long books per se, but some are just long because no-body got around to telling the (famous)author to cut all the rubbish out J K Rowling

Getting things worng - science history, geography etc. If you are gonig to set it in the 'real' world, be real.

I toss a book aside if I don't like the protagonist. I guess you would call it a value judgement, although it has nothing to do with the subject matter. I had to put down "Little Children", not because one of the main characters was a pedophile, but because I thought the femal protagonist was too smug for my taste. I could not work up interest in what happened to her or the world in which she lived. If I have some connection to the main character, I can probably work through any kind of writing.

If I come across any instances of 'alright' instead of 'all right,' I tend to close the book and put it down immediately. I then walk away from it, as if somehow embarrassed by it.

That's alright. We won't hold it against you.

Interesting thread!

Off the top of my head: It bores me to tears reading endless ponderings or long-winded descriptions or excessive details that don't contribute much to the story or that delay the action for so long that I just want to skip on to the next part.

Another one, a bit hard to explain: There's a kind of writing that I find hard to absorb, although the words used are simple or common enough, like reading the prose word by word is not difficult, but all the words strung together seem so... heavy. Does that make sense?

I have a hard time with extremely idiomatic writing...stream of consciousness falls into this (think Hunter Thompson) and stuff like Trainspotting. I also can't abide writing that tries to convey accent or dialect. Makes me crazy. My eyes skim over the words and my brain has to take them in by force and it is uncomfortable.

Off the top of my head: It bores me to tears reading endless ponderings or long-winded descriptions or excessive details that don't contribute much to the story or that delay the action for so long that I just want to skip on to the next part.

thioviolight, this is exactly how I feel about Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Before I continue I must admit I did not read them, but instead listened to the unabridged audio versions. I enjoyed the characters, stories and plots of both books, but the continual preaching kept bringing the action to long stops.

Another one, a bit hard to explain: There's a kind of writing that I find hard to absorb, although the words used are simple or common enough, like reading the prose word by word is not difficult, but all the words strung together seem so... heavy. Does that make sense?

Your comment about being heavy makes sense to me. Both your comments remind of Stephen R. Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. The first time I attempted to read Lord Foul's Bane, I gave up about a third of the way in because I felt it was, as you say, heavy and I was no longer able to push my way through it. A few years later I tried again, and this time I succeeded in slogging my way through all three books.

#39: Bookmarque:
I agree with you there. That kind of thing is part of why I detested The Red Badge of Courage when I had to read it in high school. It literally made my eyes hurt to look at all those apostrophes. And when the author of a book writes out a character's accent, it makes me cringe. I occasionally read some of the Star Trek novels, and several authors (I don't remember whom off the top of my head) do that with Chekov, e.g. "Ve're going to Wulcan." *shudder* No thanks. We're going to Vulcan, and will you please stop making my favorite character look like he has a speech impediment. It's an accent, and anybody who's watched the show knows what it sounds like.

ETA: Speaking of writing out accents in Star Trek novels, I remember another one that very nearly made me choke. I believe it was The 34th Rule, one of the DS9 books, that at one point felt the need to spell out Bashir's British accent. It gave the dialogue spelled normally, then went on to explain what it sounded like, respelling "Quark" as Khwahk. I actually jumped when I saw it; it looked so awful.

Stories where people fall madly, truly, deeply, and inexplicably in love - at single glance. Come on....

But isn't falling in love always inexplicable? And the coup de foudre happens. For some, it's the ONLY way they fall in love.

ETA: that sounds more like a complaint about subject matter than writing...

Oh I hate studpid character names like "Ivy" or "Rex"....too much swearing...to name two.

You should try reading "The Wind Up Bird Chronicle" HA!

Yeah that turns me off too...very unrealistic!

Stories where people fall madly, truly, deeply, and inexplicably in love - at single glance. Come on....

But that's what happened to me when I meet my wife. Of course that is not what happened to her.

#40: LucasTrask

I've been interested in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged (I liked Anthem), but have been daunted by the length. I guess I've been worried they slow down like you said. I'll probably try reading them in the future anyway to find out for myself how I find them. =)

i get the worst feeling when i like the plot, but hate the writing style.

"Getting things worng - science history, geography etc."

movies, and to an extent, books are bad about quantum mechanics, computers, and other topics. if it is suspension of disbelief, then the author should not use terms like "512 bit encryption" relating to a firewall. now the x-files did it in a funny way, referencing a real operating system exploit, and the Matrix had a console shot with authentic shell and tools.

>44 clm256poetry: I agree with you about naming, but think it goes even further. If I ever wrote a book and wanted some throw away gags, I'd have characters like Dante Hero or Horatio Fistfighter. Of course, the name would be funny only once, and then it would become excessively annoying.

Not a fan of Thomas Pynchon, I take it?

Bookmarque, I'm with you on the stream of consciousness. I just can't deal with it. It's part of the reason why I just couldn't do House of Leaves.

OMG House of Leaves was torture. Funny you should mention it - I recently got it off the shelf again with the idea that I could read it again. It's sitting next to my bed. After skimming a few parts, I'm not convinced I could finish it.

Abuse of italics sucks, I agree. One good thing about ebooks, you can get rid of 'em. :)

Other than that, boring or no plot is a killer for me these days.

Message 36: Anytime I come across the phrase "rolls his eyes" or a variant of it, I tend to immediately lose faith in the writer's abilities and more often than not end up putting down the book.

"Jenny rolled her eyes at him in exasperation"

See I think that sounds really stupid and I'm just not sure what that action is supposed to look like. It conjures up quite ridiculous images in my mind.

I also hate the way (mostly americans, I'm sorry) use the word "pop".

"This green eyeshadow will really make your eyes pop!"

I think there are much better ways of describing the way the eyes will be enhanced than by saying they will "pop". Or the outfit, or the whatever. Whenever I meet this usage in writing I again lose confidence in the author.

Message 42:
Stories where people fall madly, truly, deeply, and inexplicably in love - at single glance. Come on....

Oh my yes - I do agree.